


Last Round at the Hog's Head

by hes5thlazarus



Series: Lazarus' Harry Potter Daydreams [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Snapetober, Snapetober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 31
Words: 9,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26743435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hes5thlazarus/pseuds/hes5thlazarus
Summary: 1: Snape struggles with insomnia.2: Poison is easy to pluck, to brew, to incant.3: Snape stews and regrets.4: Snape sleepwalks.5: Snape has a fever dream.6: Probation sucks.7: Snape wakes up from a good dream.8: Long-term use of Occlumency hurts.9: Snape buries his grandfather, a union man.10: Snape helps Filch.11: Alice Longbottom got what was coming to her.12: Snape chases after the wolf.13: Severus forever! Against all enemies.14: Snape abandons Advanced Potion Making.15: Snape drinks Felix Felicis.16: The jury's still out on whether he's dead or not.17: Snape fucks, but weekends only.18: Falling or flying: he hits the ground running.19: Regret's a kind of poison, and the only remedy is death.20: Everyone hates him.21: Eat death! But it's harder than it looks.22: They bulldoze Spinner's End.23: Sev lies to Lily.24: Too much coffee.25: Migraines suck.26: Snivellus cries.27: This isn't justice.28: Lily asks, "What did you do?"29: He realizes he isn't alone.30: He hates himself.31: In his own words.
Series: Lazarus' Harry Potter Daydreams [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954336
Comments: 11
Kudos: 43
Collections: Snapetober





	1. Insomnia

Sleep never comes, no rest for the wicked. Sev spent an hour, and then another hour, and another, tossing and turning and churning over in bed, everything that had gone with the day, the week, his goddamn life. He had two double-period classes in the morning and needed to rest. He had an advisory meeting with Cho Chang, who was interested on building on his master’s thesis on tempest-potions and their use in formal dueling. Before dinner, he had arranged for a meeting with his accountant, to go the cost of dual-citizenship and how exactly he was expected to pay taxes to the American government, and then of course he needed to make an appearance at the Hog’s Head, ostensibly to spy on Mundungus but really to grouch to Aberforth. And he could do none of that effectively, with absolutely no sleep. And he was getting no sleep.   
  
Sev got up and flicked the fire awake again. Flames sprang up, a merry orange. He scowled and turned them green, and they cast cool shadows in his already dark quarters. He kneeled by the fire and warmed his hands, skin crawling with stress and fear and anger, anger at being awake, and thought: I cannot do much more of this. But I must. And eventually the day broke and Sev suffered through double Potions with the fifth-year Gryffindor and Slytherin class, then the second-year Ravenpuff slip, and he managed a civil conversation with Cho Chang and she didn’t even cry on him, as if she would ever dare but Felix had told him she cried on Minerva, and then he picked his way through dinner as Albus and that Umbridge creature traded poison and realized he had utterly blown off his accountant, and at the Hog’s Head he almost fell asleep at his table and Aberforth gruffly told him, “Last round, I’m closing up,” five hours before actual closing time. And he still did not sleep the next day, or the next, or the next.


	2. Poisoned

Poison is easy to pluck, to brew, to incant. Severus knows this intuitively, from the words that slash from his mother’s lips to the rat poison his father keeps above the sink. Poison is everywhere, in the smoke he breathes into his lungs, to the smog the dying mill chokes out, and sometimes it is black and sometimes it is gray and sometimes it is Avada Kedavra-green, like Lily Evans’ eyes when she called him Snivellus. Poison is easy, and it spreads like miasma in the Slytherin common room, green-tinged, where Mulciber talks about the Dark Lord and Greatness with a capital-G, and he is poisoned already by his dirty blood that these words don’t do anything to hurt him, they represent opportunity, because how does one brew the remedy except by reverse-engineering the poison already stable in the blood? Poisoned he carries his own cure, Avada Kedavra-green: Severus, please. Look at me.


	3. Torture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape stews over his own wasted potential.

Torture is listening to Dolores Umbridge drone on during yet another staff meeting that could have simply been a letter. Sinistra is shamelessly sleeping, having mastered the ability to nap everywhere sometime in 1975. Pomona is studying the dirt under her fingernails, Trelawney is drunk, and Minerva is looking for an excuse to pick a fight she cannot win. The uselessness of it is torture. The staff room is stuffy, and there are so many other things he could be doing right now. He has a batch of Felix Felicis merrily simmering in his quarters that is waiting for its final decordification. Lupin needs even more Wolfsbane, and both Dumbledore and the Dark Lord want a report of Potter’s little extracurricular study group.   
  
He could do better things, greater things, than spy on the Potter brat, or study his former professors and analyze their microexpressions for weakness, writing reports for a madman and his liberal counterpart, he could have done great things. Brewing Wolfsbane was ingrained in his muscle memory, and with the access to the Ministry’s werewolves as an experimental base, he could begin trial-testing kinder versions, he could even begin researching a cure. It was possible, he could feel its potential whenever he stoked the cauldron flames, he knew he could find it, if he had more resources, if he had more time, if he didn’t have to grade papers and patrol the halls and teach first-year lessons and spy for the Dark Lord and protect the Potter boy, who seemed keen on throwing himself into the thick of danger. He could do greater things, but it was not like he would ever get to: so, torture, torture was listening to Umbridge drone on about conflict management in a staff meeting that could have been a letter, when great things could be done, and someone not him would do them.


	4. Exhaustion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape sleepwalks through a class. Occlumency makes it weird.

Occlumency is exhausting. That is a fact they did not put into the textbook, as if that would frighten off potential practitioners, and self-regulation does not come to him naturally anyway. He is exhausted and he knows it, and there is nothing he can do about it except to keep trudging on and find a less damaging place to explode, a relatively safe place to collapse. Severus Snape is exhausted.   
  
Bone-deep tired, he is seeing the world flattened to its barest colors: flagstone gray and hints of dull green. Hogwarts is a riot of colors, especially around Halloween, but the Dark Lord wants the Potter boy sent to the Department of Mysteries. Contrarily, Dumbledore wants the boy shielded, even as he is too cowardly to meet the child’s eyes. Severus is so emotionally exhausted that meeting the boy’s gaze by accident, one interminably-long Potions class, does not even startle him. He thinks to himself: Lily is dead. It means less to him every year. He supposes he should be ashamed. She was his friend. But there are so many other failures to be ashamed about, and it is exhausting to whip himself into a fervor over every single shame. He doesn’t miss her anymore, how could he? He only misses that sick hope he had as a boy, that one day things will be less gray, that he would wake up in the morning and be ready to greet the day. The class ends and he stares at his students blankly for a second before remembering that he is a teacher and teachers give homework and he oils out a particularly busy assignment that he is capable of grading in his sleep, because he is sleepwalking today, as he has sleptwalk through his life, because it is all so exhausting, this shame, these politics, and what does he care anymore. What does he care?


	5. Fever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape has some pretty great fever dreams.

His health breaks down over Easter, and Severus spends the week hallucinating gently in bed that his quarters have flooded and he has become a fish. Everything is pleasantly green and muffled and intellectually he knows this is because of the Occlumency. He has permanently altered the way his brain chemistry responds to extreme stress and in the long term it bodes ill, but since the Mark began to darken he has been living hour by hour, slightly (unpleasantly) surprised to see he is still alive. He cannot feel his body but he knows he is sweating and shivering, alternating hot and cold, and he knows Pepper-Up’s mood-stabilizing component will react badly with his shields, so he orders a house elf to check on him every four hours and settles in for the ride.   
  
He is vaguely aware that he eats pumpkin soup and occasionally lentils and there is a cat with Avada Kedavra-green eyes that is watching him but it is definitely not Minerva because he has his quarters specifically warded to set her on fire, but he doesn’t have a cat so who the fuck is it? Does he have a cat? Has he had a cat all the time? For all time? How long? Then the house elf reappears and it turns out the cat was the house elf and this makes sense in context but not right now and not later. Then he is cool and wrapped in fresh linen and his room is no longer an aquarium and the light from the winter is gold and gentle and vaguely Mediterranean. This is not a dream, it’s just magic, and the magic cradles him and soothes the heat in his bones and when he wakes, he is tired but feeling gold.


	6. Dementors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape deals with the conditions of his probation.

The dementors stay in your head. Probation is just an extension of prison. Severus checks in with his auror every month. They scan his wand and record each cast, and he explains them: “Scourgify--for a cauldron. Scourgify--for another cauldron. Scourgify--for the sink into which I dumped a cauldron.” They do not think he is funny. No one ever does. It is difficult to make a dementor laugh, though he has heard it has happened. He’s heard they’ve taken a liking to Sirius Black.  
  
The months drag on and he cleans his quarters the Muggle way, trying to keep some semblance of self from the Ministry. Lucius has offered to buy him another wand, but once every three months the house elves take inventory for the Ministry, and Dumbledore orders them to be true. He has to. There is nowhere to hide. He must live his life in the public eye.  
  
Azkaban isn’t dirty, it’s whitewashed and bleached clean, and smells like the inside of a Muggle hospital, like the room in which his grandfather died, shrivelled from the dust in his lungs. The dementors carry that same smell of viral rot, and when he leaves Severus suspects he stinks of it, from the way others shy away from his dead-eyed stare. He is exposed. The dementors banished all the shadows, and all that he has left sits in Ministry registries, laundry lists, and the harsh sun that bleaches even the dungeons too clean.


	7. Nightmares

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape has to wake up from a good dream.

Sometime in December 1997, Severus has a dream. In the dream, he is sitting outside at an overpriced London cafe, drinking milky coffee. There is a man across from him, face in shadow, and they are laughing, talking about the Sarah Kane play and the theatre of cruelty, Lars von Trier and Pasolini, art and bad taste and tormenting the self on stage, self-flagellation and artistic voyeurism, and he’s confessing he gets off on the performance, he really does, and the man is reaching across to touch his hand and then the Mark rises up through his skin, and the man says, “What’s this?”   
  
He wakes up hard and angry and hurting and missing the touch of the man, what was his name, no one, he can almost see the lay of his face but the shadows took it along with what could have been, and he is so ashamed. He whips off the covers and takes a cold shower. He dresses for the day and darts his eyes away from the mirror and his aging face, he had never been handsome, beautiful, pretty, striking was the best he got at Lucius Malfoy’s wedding, at the epogee of his youth, and he hurries to the Dark Lord’s call and tries not to think of lost opportunity, because in that world he was actually paid to be an actor, and to talk and to fuck like it too. What a fucking nightmare, this world is. What the fuck is this.


	8. Secret Injury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Long-term exploitation of the art of Occlumency does more harm than good.

Occlumency damages one’s emotional control. Every Occlumens knows this. He finds his ability to react to sunrises, the gold autumn over the Black lake, compromised. One fall morning, he weeps alone by the beach. Another day, pausing in the midst of a run, grief spasms he falls to the ground roughly and curls into a ball, trying to keep the scream in. The crisp air moves him. He cannot breathe. Eventually, it passes, and he occludes so hard he rips the gold, orange, red, purple fire of fall away from his eyes and the world goes monochrome like his dad’s old telly. Severus tells no one, but sometimes he darts a glance at the Dark Lord at those interminably long report-backs at Malfoy’s mansion and wonders. He had never much interest in magical creatures, unless he was pickling them, but how did snakes see? Did He mourn the loss of color? Had he seen it to begin with? He and Dumbledore and Tom Riddle all carry that secret injury: to keep control they lost the taste of life. 


	9. Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape buries his grandfather, a union man.

Mother tells him, “Stop shuffling, stand up straight.” She straightens his tie. It does nothing to distract from the fact that his suit is too big for him. Dad got it for him thinking he’d grow into it, but he never manages to eat enough to fill out, even though he’s always hungry, noticeable enough that the others at school laugh at him for it. Granddad’s dead and he’s the last Snape alive, Mother somehow never quite counts. They sit at the front row during the church service and he’s numb through the priest’s speech. The union’s there, of course, and the last of the old men. He glances at the bleeding heart of Jesus near the altar and thinks _thou shalt not suffer a witch to live_. But Granddad thought the magic was marvelous, more than Dad did.  
  
Dad’s too much of a toerag to show up to his own father’s funeral so it’s only him and Mother trailing the coffin to the burial grounds. It’s mostly the old men from the union who are the other pallbearers, and he is surprised at the heft of the coffin, and that at their age and without the protection magic gives the old they can still carry it. But he remembers Granddad’s old stories. The coffin’s lowered into the grave, he isn’t sure how it all happens, and then someone prompts him to scatter dirt onto it. Dust to dust. They probably all tell their grandsons the same stories, he can’t be the only one remembering. They go back for refreshments--as if you can feel refreshed after burying your grandfather--and Mother adjusts her graying hair in the mirror and says, “Thank Merlin your father didn’t come. I don’t know how the union would’ve reacted.”  
  
“Granddad would’ve liked a fight over his grave,” Sev says rustily. “Somebody roughing up a scab. One last hurrah.”  
  
“Solidarity forever,” Mother says bitterly, and there is history wrapped up in that old slogan. He feels it around his throat like a scarf, or maybe a noose, and he almost reaches for her to ask what, what happened, but he remembers enough, that Eileen Snape kicked her husband out after scabbing for the foreman, and won her father-in-law’s undying respect. Except, of course, he did die. She sighs, and returns to the parlor, and he is left staring at his own reflection, sallow and greasy, his father and grandfather’s dark eyes empty in his own face. Sev leans against the wall for a second, overcome: the last of his name. What will they do if Dad comes back? But the old men are singing now, something Irish, at least it’s not actually “Solidarity Forever,” he hates that song, and so he slinks in and watches the end of an era.  
  
Lily asks him later what the funeral was like and he shrugs. “Sad, I guess,” he mumbles, because how do you explain the end of not just a family, but of a whole kind of man? They go back to Hogwarts and Mulciber and the others don’t quite know what to say--“sorry not sorry your muggle granddad’s dead”--and he throws himself into his work because there is nothing else to do with his grief except to excel at what he can.


	10. "You're bleeding!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape tries to be helpful.

“You’re bleeding,” Snape says, and pulls his wand out. Filch shoves him away roughly.  
  
“Fuck right off with that, yeah?” he says. “Give me a fucking washcloth.”  
  
Snape snaps, “Infernal Squib!” but does what he says, gingerly picking up a rather dusty looking cloth from the man’s desk. He sanitizes it wandlessly and wordlessly and hands it to Filch. Filch presses it to his nose.  
  
“Fuck those brats,” he snarls. “We need to bring back whipping them, that keeps them in check.”  
  
Snape occasionally likes whipping someone and being whipped and would rather not mix his private and professional life in even more unhealthy ways. He makes a noncommittal sound as Filch continues to rant. He respects the sentiment. The Weasley twins have gone too far, and the punching telescope was cruel, particularly since Filch only has physical means to protect himself. He notices the manacles hanging from the ceiling and idly wonders if he could borrow them, but then Filch would ask him why he wanted them, and then start talking about torturing the students again, and that was not an association he would like to make.  
  
When Filch pauses for breath, Snape interjects: “I hate it here.”  
  
Filch laughs. “But there’s nowhere else to go, is there? You and me, Hagrid too, Dumbledore’s little projects. He’ll always find a way to keep us in his debt. And I’m too old for anything else. But you? The only way you’re getting out of here is an Unforgivable. He’ll never let you go, you know.”  
  
Snape says, “You’ve got blood on your hands, you know.” They meet each other’s gaze and both start to laugh. The only way out for either of them is an Unforgivable, and he doesn’t want more blood on his hands.


	11. Scars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice Longbottom got what was coming to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caveat lector: this is a really nasty one. Discussion of police brutality and victim-blaming. Snape is a bastard, but so is everyone else mentioned. Please read at your own discretion.

The bar of the Hog’s Head is scarred and scorched with nearly a century’s worth of drunken fights. Severus knows the story of some of them, they’re notorious in Slytherin. He’s only made two of them, and he edges out the outline of the scorch mark he’s personally responsible for with his fingernail, then leans back and downs his whisky. It’s shit, of course it is, but he cleaned the glass, and he can trust that Aberforth won’t poison him.  
  
Alice Longbottom was a bitch and had what was coming to her and even the whisky pooling warm and sour can’t keep the vicious ugly grin from spreading across his face as he regards the scar he left on the bar of the Hog’s Head, duelling her seventeen years ago. She’d accused him of Dark Magic, and of course she was right, but what was the point of trying to arrest a Slytherin in 1978 for dark magic in that particular pub of all places, at that point it was just discrimination, everyone experimented. Wilkes and Mulciber and the lads had been there too, that was before anyone had gotten saddled down with children and gotten killed, and they wrecked havoc trading spells with her and Black and Vance, it had been fun because there was no way they were going to be able to bring them into the station not yet. Aberforth had finally kicked the lot of them out when he’d scorch the bar, but only banned Black, gave the rest of them final warnings. Of course Alice got her revenge, she and her man brought him into custody two weeks later, and it’d taken him six years of physical therapy and nerve potion experimentation to get rid of the fine motor delay their questioning left him. Yeah, Alice Longbottom was a bitch and had what was coming to her, and it was funny, funny, that Bella was back out, because maybe she’d finish the job, and Merlin he hoped it wouldn’t be quick.  
  
He ordered another round and drank that down slow.


	12. Panic Attack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape chases after the wolf.

Heart racing and rage, a throbbing headache and pain in his chest, Snape bounded through the castle grounds, he couldn’t breathe but that was because he had stitch in his side, Merlin he’d let himself get out of shape, no one Lupin disarmed him, fuck this all, fucking werewolf on the grounds and _Black_ and fucking _Potter_ and his merry little band of marauders, he had to tell Dumbledore, Dumbledore would deal with this, he hadn’t the first time but surely the bastard had learned from his mistakes. Merlin he hated the Whomping Willow, who honestly thought _that_ would protect them all.  
  
Snape skittered to a stop at the castle door and threw it open with an impatient blast. Filch was there, open-mouthed and sour, but he shoved past him, tripping over his own cloak as he ran, head throbbing, heart pounding, up too many flights of stairs, portraits gossipping and ghosts gasping as he tripped over the trick stair for the first time since he was eleven, banging his chin hard on the marble stair. He took a second, dazed, and then ripped himself up like a bat out of hell, and he was bleeding and panting and concussed and wide-eyed and utterly panicked when Dumbledore let him into his office, Cornelius Fudge ensconced in his armchair, and when the Calming Potion Pomfrey forced down his throat an hour later finally took hold, he was so humiliated he made sure Lupin would suffer, like he’d suffered, just to have some sense of dignity and righteousness back.


	13. Sectumsempra

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a very short prose poem

Sectumsempra: for enemies, he’d scrawled as a boy. Of course it was decent as a knife for cutting particularly reactive ingredients, but he’d lost that fine motor control needed for the spell to work like that. It was best for enemies, to hurt them and scar them up. “Separated forever,” that’s what the Latin meant: or sever forever, if he wanted to be poetic. It was meant to be wordless, his own mantra. Severus forever! Against all enemies.


	14. Abandoned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape abandons Advanced Potion Making, in more ways than one.

He left the book in the cupboard and never expected to see it again, since he retired its use once the Board of Governors granted him control over the curriculum. It’d been important to him as a child, of course, he’d gotten interested in spellcraft early and Lucius Malfoy was always happy to supervise his experiments for extra credit, and Bella got a kick out of the toenail hex. Snape was proud that he’d supercede Libatius Borage by the time he was fifteen, Slughorn had expected great things of him, the muggle-raised millrat, and still set him up with apprenticeships, even procured him an offer to research improvements to Wolfsbane in Germany, on the other side of the wall.  
  
Then he’d taken the Dark Mark, and okay he could’ve gotten out of it, Regulus hadn’t pressured him that much, no one knew where Tobias lived, and Eileen could take care of herself, no one was threatening his family, but Malfoy was willing to pay hand over fist for the more interesting potions, like the one that could liquify intestines five hours after ingestion, and he’d worked it to be mostly tasteless too, just a tinge sour and you’d start feeling fuzzy in the mouth a hour before it killed you. Snape had won an award with that one, since it made getting the skin and bones off certain mammalian ingredients so much earlier.  
  
Once the war went into full force he didn’t have a lot of time for research or spellcrafting, never made anything as brilliant as Sectumsempra or Muffliato, and it was worse when they locked him up in Hogwarts and put him on probation, because every month the Aurors would check his wand, and yes Lucius offered to invite him over and set him up with a workshop on the grounds of the Manor for the summers, take his probation in hand, but he was tired in being his debt, and abandoned his dreams of spellcraft as yet another deadend he had blocked for himself.


	15. "Stay with me."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At a conference in New York in 1985, Snape drinks some Felix Felicis.

The year is 1985 and Sev is half-dancing down Broadway to Washington Square, he’s presented at his first international conference and the paper was received well and when he snarked at the questioners people _laughed_ , everything had gone right and to celebrate he took a swig of Felix Felicis to give himself a truly perfect day, because he deserves a bright spot in between catastrophes. He swaggers around the park and checks out the other queers. Some of them eye him back. He’s been told the pier is the place to go, just to be careful, but he grew up in Cokeworth, he can handle this. Sev spots an empty chair by the chess hustlers and watches the games with interest, and when they try to hustle him he wins, again and again, and he didn’t need Felix for that.  
  
Chuckling to himself, Sev starts hounding for a bar and who does he run into by Sheridan Square but a bloke who’s a dead ringer for Regulus Black himself, and then he does a doubletake, because Regulus has been missing-presumed dead for five years, at least.  
  
Regulus sees him and blanches, but Sev grabs at him. “What are you doing here?” he demands.  
  
Regulus snatches his arm away. “I could ask the same of you,” he says stiffly. He squints at him. “Are you drunk?”  
  
Sev doesn’t want to explain what he’s on. “Sure.” He smiles slowly. “Why are you alive?”  
  
“A question I ask myself too often,” Regulus sighs. He looks furtively around, then says, “Listen, don’t tell Cissy or the others you saw me. Cissy knows I’m somewhere, just not where. You know what--just stay with me, it’ll be good to catch up. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway? How are you not in jail?”  
  
Sev laughs.


	16. Presumed Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is he? Or isn't he?

They put him on the missing list because his body is gone by the time someone remembers to collect it, but the bloodstain is so large they presume he’s dead. No portrait appears in the Headmistress’s Office, but Minerva points out he abdicated his post, so why would Hogwarts remember him? Severus Snape betrayed them.  
  
They presume he’s dead but Narcissa Malfoy sends a letter to a friend of hers in New York with nothing interesting in it, just news about Lucius’ trial and Draco’s probation, and how she’s hoping they will get house arrest instead. The Manor now has enough angry ghosts to make it as haunted as Azkaban. The Ministry is seriously considering it.  
  
Severus Snape’s body is missing and Harry Potter holds a funeral on the grounds anyway, and his friends all show up and they’re uncomfortable at the panegyric because Snape, while one of the good guys, was a right bastard. None of the Slytherins come. They don’t hold ceremonies without the body. Instead, Daphne Greengrass throws a huge party. Even a couple Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs and the only reasonable Weasley (Percy, actually) are invited.  
  
Harry lobbies to get a portrait painted and placed in the office and Minerva resists it for as long as she can, because she really doesn’t want Snape sneering down his long nose at her while she’s trying to work and undermining her in death as much as he did in life. Besides, she points out, he’s missing--presumed dead. Wait until she’s dead, please. Though she doesn’t say that last bit out loud.  
  
Horace Slughorn talks loudly and at length to everyone who will listen how he taught Severus Snape, poor boy, so much promise, but he outdone us all on the heroism front, a true credit to Slytherin cunning, shame we couldn’t find the body, but of course _I_ presume he’s dead, you cannot exsanguinate that much and walk away, m’boy, trust me, I’m a Potions Master.  
  
Though if you have a perfectly-timed Porkey and a quart of Felix Felicis in your system, a Potions Master and an entire staff of devoted house elves at your disposal, maybe you can, after a few weeks of resting in a safehouse protected by Filius Flitwick’s most powerful Fidelius Charm. But as for now, Severus Snape is missing, presumed dead, and that’s how the Wizarding World likes it.


	17. Touch-Starved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Snape fucks, but only on the weekends.

Weekends he escapes to Manchester. No one he knows from schools hangs out there, the music is good, and there are enough places to dance the grit of the workweek away. The muggle places are best, the accents are familiar, and the aesthetic is enough for him to blend in when he’s got a man bent over a sink and begging in a dirty bathroom, enough for him to convince him to take him home. Every night is a risk: it might not be enough to get him through the morning, but he needs it, he needs it, and he does not want anyone to know where he goes, or follow him when he leaves, because this is his one self-indulgence, this is his one need.  
  
He doesn’t let anyone touch him in the morning, not after he’s taken that shower and left breakfast and a cup of coffee,or tea, or whatever. Lately he’s only been fucking guys who drink coffee, it’s not on purpose. He needs the sensation of the night to play on his skin, under the sweater and the scarf and the jacket he bundles himself in, he needs to rock into the phantom of touch-memory to sustain him through the day. He needs to sit on the train and remember how his body looked under that one shitty fluorescent bulb in a rank toilet, he needs to remember how it felt to push someone into coffee-stained sheets and bite down, hard. He needs to hold these memories to his skin as he sits on the train back to the Public Floo to Hogwarts on every dreary Sunday afternoon, ash in his mouth, because he’s already hungry for something more, for the anonymity and endlessness of it, and it will be five long days til the next weekend, and slow starvation has never been a kink of his.  
  
Starvation has little to do with food and all to do with affection. Those nights, he’s wanted, he courts and is courted in return, and though he always leaves in the morning, it satiates at least one worry: _I am not living enough I am wasting my youth I am as unfuckable as I was at eighteen_. It feeds his ego, getting off, it feeds his soul, being wanted. But wanting never ends and though he’s careful to never get attached in the anonymity, sometimes he’ll wonder what it’d be like, to be like those couples who’ve taken him home a few times, to have someone to make breakfast for and feast upon and never be hungry again. But then there is Duty, there is Sacrifice, there is the likelihood he will be dead before he is forty and cannot explain to a lover why. There is explaining to Narcissa, to Lucius, to Dumbledore, why he has a muggle in his will. There is explaining to the Dark Lord why he’s muddying himself up. So it is better to pass, to leave himself starving, than risk the alternate: a satiety that would feel too good. Why lose anonymity? The adrenaline rush of a chance encounter is a meal of itself.


	18. Falling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Less falling, more flying: but it takes a lifetime to learn how.

He’s fallen out of windows, bars, chairs, love, and friendship, but the best fall he’s ever had was the running leap he takes out of the Hogwarts window. It’s finally happening, it’s finally here, all or nothing, his entire life hinging on one moment: now is the hour. The final battle commences. He jumps, falls, rolls, and keeps running. A lifetime of falling has taught him how to land on his feet.   
  
Felix pulsing through his veins, Sev rushes through the crowd, hexing indiscriminately because every hit will land, rushes to the end, and when the Dark Lord strikes him down he falls, memories seeping and finally letting him go, he’s falling through the past with a shattering of glass and when he wakes up, he’s stuck the landing in the quiet sunlight of Shell Cottage, under Filius Flitwork’s most powerful Fidelius Charm, and he is finally his own Secret Keeper.   
  
He’s fallen from Lily’s grace, he’s fallen from his parents’, he’s fallen from Regulus Black’s good wishes and Harry Potter’s damnable eyes. He’s fallen to his knees, begging for his friend’s life to be spared, before two unholy men. He’s fallen arse-over-tit, to Potter’s spells. But now, now, now, he’s fallen the right way, through the windowglass, and this quiet morning, still somehow alive, he resolves: less falling, more flying, because he knows how.


	19. Regret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regret's poison, and the only remedy is death.

Regret is a kind of poison, and he tries to keep himself busy so he doesn’t drink from it, but it is everywhere, offered in a statue’s hand, ornamenting every other corridor in Hogwarts. It would be so much easier if he could move: but no, that’s out of the question, the terms of his probation are the leash by which Dumbledore keeps him by hand, and he regrets that he has always been someone’s dog, Lily’s, Lucius’s, the Dark Lord’s, Dumbledore’s, the fucking Potter brat.  
  
Regret tugs at the leash and has him chanting the most powerful anti-hex he knows to keep an eleven-year-old clinging to his own broom, even when he humiliates his home team. Regret collars him and keeps his mouth closed as Lupin swans about the halls, dressing him up in Frank Longbottom’s mother’s clothes. Regret laughs when he tells the Dark Lord exactly where Karkaroff is hiding, in the house he sold him. He had always liked Moscow: now, no more.  
  
Regret dogs his footfalls when he flies away from Minerva’s ridiculous spells, she was never a duellist, and when he meets the Dark Lord on his own terms it is almost with a laugh when the remnants of the man tell him, “I regret it,” because he doesn’t, no one else ever has, and now now now, he can die free, because you cannot feel regret when you’re dead. Regret is a kind of poison, a snake that strikes at the artery in your neck, and the only remedy is death.


	20. Paranoia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not true, even if he thinks it is.

Everyone is out to get him and that’s a fact. It is what it is and it’s unpleasant but there is something about him, an odor redolent of Spinner’s End and his mother’s cigarillos, that immediately offset every interaction he makes. Everyone hates him and there is nothing Severus can do but prepare for the inevitable distaste.  
  
As he grows other he gets it articulated for him: “Snivelly.” It’s something in the way he speaks, there no matter how he articulates past that Northern burr, no matter how he apes Lucius Malfoy and learns how to intimate the more genteel Dumbledore. It’s in the way that he breathes, no matter how quietly he inhales and exhales he rasps against other’s existence. Potter sums it up. It’s because he exists. There’s something inherently wrong with him and there is nothing he can do about it except prepare.  
  
So he prepares. He goes on the offensive. He laughs in their face and mocks, viciously mocks, baring bad teeth into a bloody smile. He gives up on his hair and smokes cheap cigarettes and swaths himself in black, because if he is always going to be the worst thing in a room, he is going to make sure he will not be ignored, a bat out of hell flapping in the face of everything right in the world.  
  
He’s wrong, of course. There is nothing wrong with him. People flinch at his voice because he has a lovely one, people stare because he prowls into a room rather than walks, and he has a power all his own that in a happier man, would be called charisma. But he is never happy, and the paranoia is all he has left.


	21. Death Eater

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eat death! Well, Sev can't quite.

When he was young, he thought the idea of eating death was profound, but now he doesn’t understand what he was on. Sev remembers Lucius and Bella rhapsoding in the common room about Isis and Osiris and the resurrection, about Hermes Trismegistus and the trail Petronius left. It was exciting to be part of something ancient. The Princes were not members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, they didn’t eat death, they just died. But those who joined the Dark Lord’s service prospered.   
  
He still likes the tattoo. He’s old enough now to know better, he knows it’s distasteful, but it reminds him of the men who entranced him when he was a boy, the tough guys, the ruffians his father wanted him to be better than, with his posh witch of a mother, destined for that posh school. It’s a brand, yes, but it’s a statement, it looks cool, an old sailor’s tattoo, and Severus is unsurprised to find out that Tom Riddle was muggle-raised, because there were plenty of soldiers coming home with something like that after the war, and he wonders if the Dark Lord liked to saunter around certain parks and stations like him, when he was young. But Bella is so slavishiously devoted, he doesn’t even dare look.   
  
The torture’s not so fun. He doesn’t like the killing, and that was a surprise. Years of butchering small animals and he can’t do it with someone he knows has a soul. They all said he was a freak, a monster, no empathy, but when comes down to eating death, to ripping the life out of someone, he couldn’t do it. He can’t muster the hate. At the end of it all, he can’t digest it. He likes life too much to do it. He’s got that vital spark, and only for Albus Dumbledore, who tried to strangle it, can he swallow it.


	22. Collapsed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're never going to bring the development to Spinner's End.

They’re knocking down most of the houses but he won’t sell out. This is all he’s got left, after all, his only property, and his grandfather instilled in the necessity of never selling out. Land over cash: the house is shit but it is his, and he is tired of living in furnished rooms. Hogwarts is a terminal lease, it’ll kill him in the end. But Spinner’s End birthed him. He is not going to sell out.  
  
He collapses on the sofa after the shouting match with the agent. Severus has enough protective hexes that there’s no sense in intimidating him, but he hadn’t wanting to put up a Notice-Me-Not charm quite yet, he liked going by the pub and everyone knowing him. But all the young folks are moving out, and everyone his age is packing up their families and moving elsewhere. The crush of modernity: first the enclosures, then the mill, now this _development_. He’d rather live in this shabby shack that in a tower, that’s for sure. At least he had a garden, and since he installed the bathroom, it wasn’t so bad.  
  
Spinner’s End was a dying town when he was a child but its final death-knell is when they’ve knocked down all the houses on his block and only his remains, like a jagged rotting tooth in a sea of decay. He picks through the rubble at night, imagining what an archaeologist will think two hundred years from now, and how they will skirt the space his house leaves. Severus picks up the house number of his great-aunt’s house. He considers keeping it and then just drops it, and brushes the dirt off his hands onto his robes. He surveys the dump and his nostrils flair and he murmurs to himself, “What a waste.” They will never bring the development there.


	23. "Don't touch me!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sev lies to Lily, and she doesn't know why.

Sev snaps at her, “Don’t touch me!” Lily crosses hers, annoyed.   
  
“Sev,” she says, “let me see.”   
  
Fuck right off, he thinks but does not say. Lily does what she wants and that is nosing into his business. She gossips, which makes it worse. He tries so hard to hide what goes on but she always finds out, and she always lets it be known. She takes his arm gently and examines the rip in his sleeve, the barely-scabbed over cut. Lily frowns.   
  
“Who did this to you?”   
  
“No one,” he says. “Really. A spell backfired.”   
  
“Sev,” she says, exasperated, “spells don’t backfire on you.” That’s true. He’s very good at what he does, but this one he fucked up, and he doesn’t want her to know he was throwing something like this at Potter, and that Potter managed to throw it back. What’s worse, that’ll she judge him for fighting, or that she’ll know Potter beat him? He can take her pacifist shit and swallow it, it’s annoying, but he couldn’t stand it if she thought he were weak, he couldn’t.   
  
Sev says, “I was fucking around with a new cutting curse after class and the mirror threw it back too quickly for me to block. It’s my fault, really. I wasn’t quick enough to block it.”   
  
Lily is quiet, and very clearly thinking. Normally he likes to watch the wheels turning, but he’s annoyed her somehow, he doesn’t know why. He just doesn’t want her to know, she should be able to let that be. She runs around all the time with Mary and the others and he doesn’t ask questions, he doesn’t want to know. She can let him be.   
  
“The curse mirror in the Defense classroom? Dumbledore gave you permission to use that?” He winces. He should’ve thought the lie through, but whatever, he can talk himself out of this.   
  
“I don’t need permission,” he says loftily. “Sluggy looks the other way. It’s fine.”   
  
“It’s  _ not _ fine, Sev, you need to stop thinking you’re above the rules like that.” Lily reaches for his arm but pulls away before she touches him and looks away. She knows he’s not telling her something, he knows she knows, and the distrust rankles between them. Perhaps he should’ve said: I tried to fuck Potter up, but it blew up in my face, as usual, and perhaps that would have made her tut, but it would have made her smile too.


	24. Crying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snivellus cries, but Snape leaves that behind.

Snivellus cries too easily. For all he fronts the image of a snarling stoic, Severus feels tears creep into his eyes at the slightest of provocations, and it is so easy to provoke him. He was not born with a merry and blithe temperament, after all, and Occlumency and exhaustion undermine his ability to regulate his emotions. He learns later, long after the war, that trauma, and being perpetually retraumatized, makes it difficult to sort an appropriate response. “Trauma”--he’s heard that word so many times it has lost its meaning.  
  
Severus still wakes up crying, a snarl twisting his face, fist outraised. He has dreamed like that since he was a child. There has always been so much to cry over--what spilt milk actually met, his grandfather getting sicker, his mother and father fighting, and then how Lily never understood that he couldn’t go with her on holiday, he couldn’t buy that record, and then of course Mulciber and Wilkes taunting about his raggedy cat, and that just does not bear thinking about. He is told to breathe. How do you do that, with all this pressure in your chest and your nose clogged and everyone looking for your snivelling, the slight smirk at the edge of their lips when they see you’ve been weak?  
  
It is easier sometimes to panic. It is easier sometimes to throw oneself off the brink and collapse and wordlessly, soundlessly scream because what else, and then he picks himself up and washes his face and sneers at his own aging reflection and massages the spots of redness that appear, and when he turns his heel and leaves, cloak billowing behind him, he has left Snivellus in the bathroom, and Severus Snape has appeared.


	25. Shaking, Trembling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape drinks too much coffee.

He’s had too much coffee and he feels like shit, he’s shaking not because he’s frightened or angry, it’s just the caffeine but it’s been two days since he’s slept more than two hours and yes he should have eaten more but everything turns to ash in his mouth and he feels like shit. He should brush his teeth but he can’t be arsed, too much to do just rolling out of bed and buttoning himself into his clothes, at least he doesn’t smell, he doesn’t care, he just wants to get through the day.   
  
Albus says he should try herbal tea, a calming camomile and he stares at him so darkly Albus winces. He refills his mug pointedly, and drinks it down black. It burns his throat and he doesn’t actually like black coffee, but he has a point to make. That point, he doesn’t want to articulate it to himself, because it is the petty moments that count. Dignity? He has the clothes for it, nothing else matters. That’s what Lucius Malfoy taught him.   
  
At the end of the day his fingers are shaking so badly he can’t quite unbutton his robes. He hasn’t had any water all day, but he’s had five cups of coffee as bitter as his soul. He feels sick and collapses into the fat armchair Slughorn had left for him, when they first switched jobs. Charmed, the armchair begins to heat up and a glass of seltzer materializes. He picks it up and is proud when it does not spill, and tries to get take of himself. Sometimes, after all that coffee, he can make it. He can get through the day.


	26. Headache

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape suffers through a migraine.

Occlumency prevents emotional headaches, not physical ones. Severus has lived with pain his whole life, but even into his thirties, he cannot find a way of coping with his migraines. He Occludes harder, because it graywashes the world so comfortingly, but even blankness hurts.   
  
The Potter brat’s a headache as well, and the Granger girl is worse. There are many things he hates more than a know-it-all, but right now, her incessant handwaving is making the air ripple before his very eyes and he does not need that distraction because Longbottom’s cauldron should not be that shade of pink and the color is probably not even pink because his eyes are so fucked, and he finally snaps, “Sit down, Granger, unless you would like to continue to swat flies after class.” She pouts and the Gryffindors all glare and he resists the urge to tell them all to grow up, because they are only twelve.   
  
He feels like his brain is being pulled out of his nostrils and that his left eye is boiling in its socket. He wants a cup of coffee and a cigarette and a slug of whiskey to help him sleep, and then a blissful monochrome morning where the lake filters out of the obnoxious brightness. Severus likes the dungeons for the darkness and warmth of its shadows, and the melancholy of underwater light. Potions with the second-years, though, he and his headache do not like.   
  
Eventually the class ends without him ripping anyone’s throat out with his teeth or his eye falling out, and he sits back in his chair and puts his hands over his eyes, because even the firelight is pulsing through his head and he feels like he’s going to be sick, teaching is a headache, living is a headache, this pain makes it so hard to just be, he can’t read feeling like this, so he goes to bed early rather than making himself sick, and when he wakes up in the cool aquamarine of a lake-filtered morning, he feels light with the absence of pain.


	27. Punishment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This isn't justice.

If someone doesn’t punish himself, he will. If someone doesn’t punish them, he’ll do it. That’s his role, to say what others would leave unsaid, to punctuate where others would leave the sentences hanging. He does not enable bad behavior. He embodies it.   
  
He’s used to being punished for the others, the judas goat of Slytherin. Mulciber and Wilkes might’ve cursed Mary Macdonald but he was the one who lost his friend. When Black set a werewolf on him, he was the one who ended up with detentions. When his mother died, he had to pay the fines to the Improper Use of Magic Office. If something’s wrong, it’s somehow his fault.   
  
He knows this isn’t right. The Dark Lord is a genocidal maniac and Severus will personally bring him down, but one thing he did was teach him dignity. He taught him how to hold himself upright and survey a room coldly, to smile harshly when someone sputters and cut at them with black ice on his tongue. At first he blames the way he’s punished on the muggle world, and the Dark Lord is the first to affirm it, that it’s not fair. And then he realizes, no: it’s because my family has no money in either world. It’s because I’m too good at what I do and I’m easier to exploit if I’m broken. It’s because everyone in this world is looking for punishment, to suffer it or to deal it out. And that’s not fair. It just isn’t.   
  
He will punish the punishers. He will live his life for a justice everyone else ignores. Lily Evans will not be forgotten, or his mother, or even what his father endured. In the last days, when everyone would quiver at his step, he would smirk to himself and think: they do not even know. I could have been so much more. When he dies the Potter brat eulogizes his devotion, but he is mistaken in one thing only: Severus Snape spent his life making sure the right people would be punished, and some of them were. Love had nothing to do with it.


	28. "What did you do?"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing, for once.

Lily finds out he’s in detention for the rest of the year and hunts him down. “What did you do?” she exclaims. At first Sev is silent. He doesn’t know what he can say, legally. Then he realizes he doesn’t know the answer to that question. He doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve this. Lily mistakes his silence for truculence and huffs.   
  
“You really need to leave Potter and his crew alone,” she says. “No one’s saying what you did but really, Sev, it’s four-against-one. You can’t think to win.”   
  
“They need to leave me alone,” he mumbles. He’s getting angry, and to his horror tears are dotting at his eyes. He closes them and wipes at them angrily, and sniffs. At least Lily won’t call him Snivellus.   
  
Lily says, “I’m your friend, Sev. I’m just trying to give you some advice. You have to leave those toerags alone. Yes, they should be expelled, but there’s no way that’s going to happen. Not with Potter’s dad on the Board of Governors. And isn’t Sirius’ family involved with the Ministry?” Sev watches her closely. When did they get on a first-name basis? “Why are you looking at me like that?”   
  
“Nothing,” he says quickly. “Nothing. You were talking.”   
  
“Well, yes.” She purses her lips. “I don’t know what you did but everyone’s so tense in Gryffindor Tower and Remus isn’t speaking to anyone but James. And really, what did you do? He’s telling everyone he saved your life.”   
  
Sev barks out a laugh like a cough after being punched in the stomach. “Is that the way they’re playing it? Fucking Gryffindors.”   
  
“What are you on about? Tell me what happened, Sev. Tell me what you did.” Lily is angry. She doesn’t like when people dangle knowledge in front of her. All the purebloods do it to her, to taunt her. He should know. They do it to him, too--but he’s better at hunting those secrets down.   
  
“Nothing,” he says darkly. He can’t talk about it. “I didn’t do anything. You have to believe me. For once, I did fuck-all.” Lily is staring at him. He can tell she doesn’t believe him, but what the fuck can he do about that? “I have class,” he says shortly, and leaves.


	29. Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the war, things change.

The year is 1998, and Severus is alone at a somewhat ratty bar on St. Mark’s in New York. A man is picking out “A Change Is Gonna Come” on a jukebox older than them both, and he is alone in a city of strangers. He doesn’t know anyone here. He has no expectations for the day, and this is his first beer since 1995.   
  
At Hogwarts, he was never alone. There were always meetings with the staff and with the House and with the parents, then one-on-ones with Dumbledore and the Dark Lord. He stares into the dirty glass, glad he picked a stout. It was the trick for drinking at Aberforth’s, though this isn’t the Hog’s Head now, is it? He is alone in a strange city, far past the ken of everyone he knows, and a man is playing music that a change is coming. He was a child when this song came out. His father loved it, and used to sing along when he was young. Perhaps he even danced with his mother in their cramped living room or kitchen, before things got bad. Severus takes a sip from his beer. It is difficult to be alone when you have memory.   
  
He is drinking a badly-poured Guinness im a dirty bar on St Mark’s, and he knows absolutely no one in this city and picked it because he would be alone. He eyes the guy at the jukebox and notices that he is eying him back. A year ago, he’d snarl at him. Instead, Severus cocks an eyebrow and drinks his beer. He has a book out, of course, he never goes anywhere without one: a book of plays, Euripides, lessons in grief. When the man slides down next to him and asks him if he’s alone or just waiting for someone, for Severus does not snarl back, but rumbles, “I suppose you’re here, aren’t you?” He was always alone before, but now it is after, and a change has been coming a long time.


	30. Self-Hatred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He hates himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Snape thinks about Nazism and Voldemort.

He hates himself and quite rightly. Severus Snape joined the Death Eaters. That’s a very hateful thing to do, to pledge yourself to a genocidal madman. So he hates himself, and he hates himself for the rest of his life, for the mistakes of his youth.   
  
Youthful hatred leaves its mark. In his case, literally. He got a tattoo. At least it wasn’t a swastika--if it had been, he might have left earlier, because his grandmother would have beaten the shit out of him. He can blend in the Muggle world, if need be. They wouldn’t call him for what he is--a Wizarding ex-Nazi. Voldemort had been clearly enamoured of Grindelwald’s Muggle friends. Snape, though, was not, and he hated himself for falling in with that lot.   
  
Self-hatred is a form of punishment, for his own hate. He hated his father, yes, and his mother too, and regretted being born--so what a way to turn that on its head, by hating what they stood for? He regretted it, he hated himself for it, and he bore its mark burned down to the bone. He hated himself for this: parents gone, Lily dead, Dumbledore too. He didn’t need the Potter brat’s recriminations to tell him what he already knew. He was a hateful creature, and hated himself too.


	31. "Why didn't you tell me?"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape answers.

Because you wouldn’t have listened to me in the first place. Because you didn’t, when I told you. Because I was going to die, and there was no point. Because I wanted to die, and didn’t want to hurt you. Because you don’t like me. Because I don’t like you. Because you’re not entitled to my time.  
  
I lived and it doesn’t matter. I didn’t think it would matter. You are James Potter’s son. I resented--I still resent--the hold your family has held on my life. I wanted to break out alone and start myself entirely anew. I have never had a proper second chance and I have lived my whole life in my mistakes’ shadows. They are terrible mistakes. I live with them still. They’re not the sort you can wish away. They aren’t the sort that can be forgiven or redeemed.  
  
I refuse to be redeemed. I find it absurd you named your son after me--his middle name, at least. Though I suppose I cannot fault you for not wanting to saddle him with a first name like “Severus.” But you told him I was the bravest man you never know? There are many far braver than me, and I find your petty attempts at redemption pitiful. I am not a nice man, Potter, and I never will be, and I want you to leave me alone.  
  
Don’t tell your son I’m still alive. Don’t you even dare think about breathing a word of this to Minerva. Yes, there are those that know. There are even those who know where I live. You are not one of them. Why should I trust you? Really? The boy who once screamed in front of Dolores Umbridge, Nazi extraordinaire, “He’s got him where it’s hidden?” I thought she was going to crucio you, and I would have let her. Foolish, foolish boy. No, none of your friends know either. Why would I trust _them_? Oh, for fuck’s sake, Potter. Look at me. Obliviate.


End file.
